Survival & Resilience
39 mechanisms in this category
Active Redundancy
Multiple systems operate simultaneously, sharing load. If one fails, others instantly absorb its load without switchover delay.
Adaptive Radiation
Following mass extinctions, surviving lineages radiate into empty niches left by extinct lineages. This proliferation phase (centuries-thousands of ye...
Adversarial Machine Learning
Techniques to fool AI detection models. Malware authors deliberately craft code to evade detection algorithms, exploiting weaknesses in how models cla...
Antigenic Variation
Pathogens evolve rapidly, changing their surface proteins to avoid immune recognition. Hosts evolve immune receptors that recognize pathogen antigens;...
Apoptosis
Your body produces 50-70 billion new cells every day through division. To maintain constant cell numbers, it must also eliminate 50-70 billion cells e...
Bet-Hedging
Desert annual plants face extreme unpredictability with rainfall varying 10-fold year-to-year. Rather than germinating all seeds in any single year (g...
Contingent Redundancy
Redundancy that scales up when leading indicators suggest elevated risk, scaling down when risks subside.
Disaster Taxa
During the survival phase immediately after mass extinctions (years-decades), 'disaster taxa' proliferate: opportunistic species that thrive in distur...
Diverse Redundancy
Instead of duplicating identical systems, use different systems that accomplish the same function through different means, protecting against common-m...
Fatal Migration
Pacific salmon migrate 1,500+ miles upstream, swimming against current, climbing 12-foot waterfalls. All salmon die after spawning - 100% mortality. T...
Four Types of Ecological Stability
Ecologists recognize 'stability' as several distinct properties: (1) Resistance - the degree to which an ecosystem resists change when disturbed (redw...
Graceful Degradation
Design systems to continue operating at reduced capacity when components fail, rather than failing completely. Neural distributed representations exem...
Great Oxygenation Event
2.4 billion years ago, cyanobacteria evolved photosynthesis. They consumed carbon dioxide and produced oxygen as waste. For hundreds of millions of ye...
Heuristic Analysis
Rather than matching exact code patterns, software detects virus-like behaviors: modifying system files, replicating across directories, hiding proces...
Homeostasis
Now we get to one of the most important concepts in biology, one that most business books completely ignore: **homeostasis**. Your body temperature r...
Insurance Hypothesis
In 1955, ecologist Robert MacArthur proposed that diverse ecosystems should be more stable than simple ones, not despite their complexity but because...
N-1 Criterion
Power grid design principle requiring systems to maintain function with any single component failure. N-2 extends this to two component failures.
Negative Feedback Loops
Here's the mechanism: homeostasis works through negative feedback loops. **Step 1: Sensor** - Detect current state (thermoreceptors measure temperatu...
Opportunistic Redundancy
Adjusting redundancy investment timing to take advantage of favorable market conditions - building when cheap, reducing when expensive.
Paradox of Enrichment
Diversity doesn't always stabilize. Under specific conditions, adding species or resources can destabilize ecosystems. In simple predator-prey systems...
Polymorphic Malware
Viruses that change their code with each infection, evading signature detection. Each copy looks different, rendering signature databases obsolete. Dr...
Portfolio Effect
The simplest stability mechanism is pure statistics. If each species' abundance fluctuates randomly and independently, the total biomass fluctuates le...
Predator Dilution
2 million wildebeest overwhelm 3,000 lions + 7,500 hyenas. Predators can't kill fast enough to deplete herd. Individual risk <1% annually vs 10-20% if...
Predator Satiation
Predator satiation is a survival strategy where synchronized reproduction overwhelms predators. When bamboo flowers simultaneously across the entire p...
Response Diversity
Species performing similar ecological roles respond differently to disturbances - they're functionally redundant but environmentally distinct. Imagine...
Sampling Effect
If you randomly assemble species into communities, diverse communities are more likely to contain a particularly productive or stabilizing species sim...
Scalable Redundancy
Systems designed to scale redundancy up or down based on needs rather than maintaining fixed redundant capacity.
Serotiny
Lodgepole pines have serotinous cones sealed with resin that wait decades for fire's heat to release their seeds. Within weeks of the 1988 Yellowstone...
Signature-Based Detection
Scanning files for known virus code patterns and blocking matches. Works well against simple viruses but rendered obsolete by polymorphic malware that...
Somatic Hypermutation
Somatic hypermutation is deliberately error-prone DNA copying in immune B cells to create antibody diversity targeting novel pathogens. This represent...
Standby Redundancy
Backup systems are maintained ready but not actively operating. When primary systems fail, backup systems activate.
Starvation Response
What happens when an organism runs out of fuel? The answer isn't simple death - most organisms have evolved sophisticated starvation responses that ch...
Stress Accumulation
Tensile stress in glaciers increases as the terminus extends farther over water. At some distance, the stress exceeds ice tensile strength (~1-3 MPa)....
Succession Trap
Alders dominate early succession because they're optimized for bare, nitrogen-poor soil. But those same traits - fast growth, high light requirements,...
Temporal Buffering
Some organisms survive cycles through sheer temporal buffering - living long enough to experience multiple cycles and averaging across them. Bristleco...
The Efficiency Paradox
In biology, organisms optimized for current conditions (e.g., all-in germination strategies) outperform in favorable phases but face catastrophic fail...
The Seed Bank Strategy
Desert annual plants maintain seed banks where only 10-30% of seeds germinate each year while 70-90% remain dormant in soil for years or decades. This...
Torpor
At night, when it can't feed, the hummingbird does something remarkable: it enters torpor, a hibernation-like state where its metabolic rate drops dra...
Transplant Shock
When a tree is transplanted, it loses 60-90% of its fine root system. The remaining 10-40% must support 100% of the original shoot system. The math do...